To The Moon
by Bandita-Dieci
Summary: Crying. She was crying – but from an overwhelming sense of warmth, not one of absence and despair.


She didn't talk about him anymore.

Once, shortly after they returned, Sadness asked her, in that soft voice of hers, "How did you get out?" She'd read the manuals – she knew that there was no way out of the memory dump, that whatever was thrown in there was lost forever, completely forgotten, erased. If anything, Sadness knew the dump better than Joy herself did, despite her trip down there.

Joy had, of course, explained – a story, exciting, dangerous, and she'd made it out alive! But her smile was not as bright as it normally was, this little flicker of wistfulness, and Sadness sat beside her the way she'd sat beside him, held her hand, patted it once.

When she'd been in the dump, Joy thought she'd learned the importance of sadness to bringing out Riley's happiness. Sadness allows for people to notice and leads to further joy – you can't have happiness without having the contrasting emotion, otherwise how would you know you were happy? But now, with that lump of failure stuck in her throat, Joy understood something else – that where she provided a good, healthy distraction, Sadness allowed her to accept and move on.

But she didn't move on.

Joy took to staying awake extra hours while Riley slept – even when she wasn't on dream duty, which she enjoyed immensely (most of the time). She studied the manuals, the little lavender knapsack decorated with candy sitting propped against her side table. Her eyes trailed through page after page, sucking everything in until, eventually, she fell asleep on the binders. The next night was the same – and although it made her a little bit weary, she pushed through, the same as she always did. Riley deserved one hundred percent, not just a fraction of it, and lack of sleep? She could fight through that, no problem!

Some nights she pushed the binders to the side, stared at her ceiling, and imagined the outer universe the way she thought he must have – inky expanse of night littered with stars and somewhere off center was the big white orb of the moon (or perhaps it was yellow – perhaps it really was made of cheese!), the way the little red rocket cart zoomed and zig-zagged through it all, broomsticks bursting into flame by the power of song and will, with its two passengers – the now teenaged Riley and the cotton candy elephant cat she'd imagined when she was too small to be able to count.

When Joy had dream duty, she'd sit with more binders, occasionally pulling up memories from Riley's younger years in an attempt to find a trace of him within them. But the more she recalled, the more she was faced with his disappearance. So she stuck with the binders – if there was a way to recover someone, she would find it.

She had to.

She wasn't going to let Riley get to the moon alone.

The binders got her nowhere.

Joy started taking trips back to long-term memory. Now that she knew the way to get back (memory recall or the newly remade train of thought, not to mention the maps of long-term that would, eventually, lead her to headquarters), she wasn't quite so frantic. Sometimes Sadness followed her, but more often than not she went alone, searching through the records.

But it had taken her too long to get down there – the forgetters informing her that all memories and all traces of him were long gone. They'd made sure to go through and get every single one of them months ago – no, years – having started long before he'd even been forgotten. There'd been a few left when she and Sadness made their first trip, but now?

No trace.

Still, every worker had to make a mistake at some point, right?

Joy told herself this – and it was true! If she could make a mistake, if she could be so completely foolish as to not understand Sadness's purpose for eleven years, then of course the forgetters could have missed something! It was probably while they were laughing over the fifteen thousandth time they'd sent the Tripledent Gum jingle up to headquarters ("Tripledent Gum will make you smile—") – she'd be more upset with them if it didn't make them so happy…and if it didn't leave room for a mistake.

So she continued her search.

The problem with searching through long-term memory was the lack of organization and the fact that the sheer quantity of memories were added to daily. Joy didn't have to go through the most recent memories – she knew she wouldn't find him there – but it took longer and longer to get back to where she'd left off the night before.

…and then, finally, she reached Riley's baby years and knew, without a doubt, that there was nothing left. Nothing. Little baby Riley had only her and Sadness, hadn't been developed enough for Disgust, Anger, or even Fear. She'd been a little bundle with one primary button (one that Joy had incessantly controlled as often as she could to keep Sadness away, to keep Riley from being anything but happy) – and no imaginary friend. Imagination Land hadn't even been built then – the core memories were only a blip in her future.

Joy didn't dare dive into the memory dump to search for anything there – although a lot of the memories piled up while others were whisked away – there was no promise she'd be able to get back out again. Riley needed her, and it would be an affront to his sacrifice to look for him there.

He was gone.

Joy didn't forget, after she was done. Riley might have, but she didn't. His knapsack decorated with the candy that was his trademark – his tears, because even little Riley had wanted her sadness to be joyful – still rested against her side table. She refused to put it anywhere else, made sure to keep it somewhere so that he would be remembered by someone.

Sadness remembered, too, although they never talked about it. She knew that she did from the way she'd glance over in the quiet moments right before Riley fell asleep, asked which binder she was on when she'd researched, kept tabs on her when she was down in long-term – sometimes she fell down there, exhausted, and woke up in her bed.

No. She had never been exhausted. Always, always, for Riley, she would push herself.

For Riley and-

Seasons passed – summer into winter into autumn into spring – and one night, late, Joy took the knapsack, held it close to her chest, and remembered. She'd thought she knew that Sadness was important – not just to Riley, but to herself, too – but it was not like her to be caught up in it. Mourning was a far cry from her general enthusiasm for life and, in fact, felt wrong.

She hadn't really cried since being in the memory dump, hadn't had a reason, but now she took up the knapsack, trying to relax and allow herself to, finally, move on.

Then she paused.

Joy blinked twice at the weight of the knapsack, and she opened it carefully, dug around inside until her fingers brushed something small, round, something almost like—

A memory.

Her eyes brightened as she grabbed it, pulling it out – remembering how when they'd met, the cotton candy elephant cat had dumped memory upon memory out of the knapsack, along with a myriad of other things (including a cat – how he'd gotten a cat in long-term memory – but, no, he'd probably found it in Imagination Land and scooped it up for safe keeping). What she hadn't realized – what now made complete sense for an imaginary friend refusing to be forgotten – was now held safe in her hands.

She danced once in her bed, glowing her bright blue, and rushed down to where Sadness was carrying out dream duty. The blue emotion looked at her as if to ask why she was awake, but Joy just pressed the yellow memory into the recall theater, flooding the dream screen with this last moment.

And there, finally, finally, he was – Bing Bong with his little red rocket, sitting behind Riley as they flew down hills and around the world; Bing Bong trumpeting his elephant nose and mimicking dolphins while Riley sat in front of him and laughed, clapped her hands; Bing Bong seeing Jangles and crying tears of candy which Riley immediately scooped up and pressed greedily between her chocolate-covered lips.

When the memory was done, Joy caught it before it could return to long-term, refusing to let this, too, be forgotten. She turned to Sadness with a smile, beaming, glowing a brighter blue than she had in what felt like years. Then Sadness reached up, touched her cheek with one hand, and seemed to smile.

Crying. She was crying – but from an overwhelming sense of warmth, not one of absence and despair.

Tears of joy.


End file.
